How can you make meetings more interesting?
If your small business holds meetings with any frequency, you might have wondered how you can make them more interesting. Of course, staying professional and sticking to the task at hand is the most important thing, but there are also ways you can help your team feel more alert, creative, and engaged.
Here are four ways you can make your business’ meetings more interesting.
1) Get out of the boardroom
A change of scenery can have a revitalizing effect on your team. Try holding meetings in a different spot if possible. For example, in a local coffeeshop, park, restaurant over lunch, or other location that’s nearby and comfortable.
2) Try short, daily, stand-up meetings
A study at Stanford Business School showed that, when meetings were held standing up and taking 10-20 minutes, decisions took 34% less time to make, with no noticeable difference in the quality of the decision. Why not try regular, super-quick meetings held standing up? These short meetings may sound like a weird idea, but some teams find they improve focus and productivity. Daily stand-up meetings are not intended to replace traditional meetings for strategic, big-picture topics. Instead, they’re best for fleshing out daily tasks and responsibilities.
3) Make it a team effort
Finding ways to foster collaboration and discussion can help your team feel more engaged. For example, you can hold the meeting using your own words and not reading off an agenda. You can also ask the team to help you quickly brainstorm some ideas for a project – one person’s thought might spark an idea in another person.
4) Make one day a week meeting-free
Are you having hour-long meetings every Wednesday just because you always have? Are you hearing feedback that certain employees don’t feel meetings are relevant to what they do, or that they take too much time away from work? If so, you may want to try setting aside one meeting-free day per week. This way, your team can be assured that there’s at least one day where they can put their heads down and work. This way, when you do have meetings (and do try to only have them when it’s necessary), your team will actually have something to contribute.